These materials are great for homework reading assignments or for use in the classroom.

DreamReader is a really useful free resource which is constantly being up-dated with new materials. The site doesn't require any kind of registeration from either students or teachers and only carries a minimum of advertising, so it's a real gem of a site for hard up teachers and certainly something we should share. Thanks to Neil Millington for producing it.

Monday, 25 September 2017

This tool enables teachers to build onto more traditional course book based courses and add a blended learning element. Once you have created an account you can upload PDF documents, or buy in text books from publishers or book stores and add them to courses.

You then give your students a code to register on the course and they can access the texts, make notes and annotate the text and build discussions around them.

The site also generates a ‘confusion report’ which can show you where the students are struggling or having problems with the text, then you can deal with the problems in the next class.

When you register as a teacher you need to tell the site which school you teach at. You can try a live demo of a course to see how it works at: https://app.perusall.com/demo

Perusall is a useful tool for turning a face to face course into blended learning without too much extra work.

Friday, 22 September 2017

This site was designed to help grade K5 - K12 native speaker students develop their reading and comprehension skills, but can also be really useful for second language development.

Students can choose from a range of graded texts and get a wide range of interactive activities and reading support. Teachers can also register on the site and assign specific texts to their students.

The reading support tools combine text-dependent comprehension questions and discussion type questions to focus students’ attention as well as text-to-speech and dictionary / glossary type vocabulary support. Students and teachers can also download the text as a pdf file.

CommonLit is great for getting students to work more autonomously on their reading skills.

Thursday, 21 September 2017

This is a really useful collection of activities assignments and tools for teachers and students.

There are lots of ready made interactive activities designed for learners. You can search through these and find something appropriate for our students. Some of these look a bit homemade, but the functionality and design is sound.

There are also tools you can use to create customised content for your students’ specific needs.

For most of the assignments you need to register on the site and create a class. You can then create assignments for students to do and track their progress.

Some of the activities are translation dependent, so registering (which is free) will also help set the language used.

Some of the activities I liked most are The Manga Maker, Vocalyzer, Essay Rank and Error Spotter. For the ones that involve voice you'll need to make sure students are working on Google Chrome.

In some cases the assignments need a little more instruction on how they are created and how they work, but it certainly looks like this is a resource that will continue to develop if it gets support.

Apps 4 EFL is free, but you can help to support it through Patron and it may well be worth doing so if you find it really useful for your students.

Wednesday, 20 September 2017

The site has a huge collection of ready made listening materials on a really wide range of international topics.

Once you register on the site, you can access listenings and scripts and well as a range of interactive and classroom activities.

Once you select a lesson you can easily get a link to share with your students.

Any teacher can register for free, use the classroom materials and share links to the resources with their students.

To use the interactive online materials and get access to the LMS you need to have a premium account. This will enable you to use and track the materials for homework assignments.
The premium membership will also allow you to customise, adapt and assign the content to specific students or classes.

Build Professional Level Online and Blended Courses with this Free Plugin

H5P is a tool for building complete courses with a wide variety of interactive task types. The tool works as a plug in with a range of platforms including Moodle, Drupal and Wordpress (all of which have free versions available) .

It’s very easy to install the plug in (took me less than 5 mins with Wordpress) and once this is done you can choose any of the interactive elements to add to your pages.

Using Flipgrid you can create a number of grids based around top level themes and then build 'topics' into these that explore specific areas of the overall theme. When you build a topic you can add various video based resources and then students can respond by recording short video clips giving their opinion on the topic.

Story Spheres is a great free app for creating immersive narrative experiences. It enables you to take the 360 degree panoramic images from your mobile device and covert them into an interactive virtual reality experience.

This is a great site for building digital interactive worksheets with a whole range of different interactions. You can embed video, images, text or audio into the worksheets and then build a wide range of interactions into them.With some of the activity types, like the open text one, students have the option to write or use voice input in the worksheets.

This is a great tool if you have a lot of transcription work to do, but also a great tool to develop students' listening. You can give them and audio file to transcribe and they can upload it and then check and correct the transcription. Once it's complete they can download and send it to you or peer check each others work.

Time 100 is an amaxing feature from Time Magazine. It's a collection of 100 images that have had the power to change the world. The images are displayed on a time line and you can scroll through and click on each image.

This has become one of my favourite tools for creating not just infographics but all kinds of digital content from reading mazes, infograhics and interactive images to video based tasks. Once you have built your learning objects you can either get a link to them or embed them into webpages or blogs.

Stories can include a wide range of media including video, audio, text, and quiz type objects as well as forums. Once created they can be embedded into websites, blogs or shared through social media.
There are some wonderful examples and a specific section for teachers on the site.

Creating your own narrative is very easy. Just register and go to your dashboard. Then click the cross to add a story. You can then add a title and introduction and start adding various interactive learning objects and media.

Once your narrative is started you can also invite others to collaborate and build the time line with you.

Once the narrative is complete you can share it or even print it as a PDF.

You can use Sutori to create interactive reading tasks for students, or better still get your students to use it to create their own project or research presentations or as task outputs as a means of assessing how much they have learned.

Sutori is a marvellous tool and free to use for teachers, but there are also premium subscription which offers learner tracking and management services, so if this is a popular tool in your school it could be worth supporting the company and investing in a subscription.

As a teacher you can create classes and assign writing tasks to students. The students do their writing tasks within the platform and can publish and share them there. This is a little like posting to a blog, but within a safe environment.

Students can comment on each others’ postings and collect them into a gallery. The site also has an interesting tool to add voice recordings so you can use this for speaking activities too.

The site is free to use with up to 40 students and they can produce up to 5 postings each. After that you have to have a premium account, but it is very reasonably priced, especially if you choose the whole school solution.

Monday, 11 September 2017

Inklewriter is a tool for creating interactive narrative or what I used to call reading mazes. These are stories that present the reader with various options through the story and allow the reader to choose how the plot progresses as they read through.

To start writing your own story just click on ‘Start Writing’, then give your story a title and add the first paragraph. You can then add the options for your reader.

The site tracks your options as you build the story and you can also see an overview map of the different connections as you write.

To find our more watch the very clear tutorial.

Before using this with students it’s a good idea to get them to read one of the stories so they understand the concept. This might be a useful one to get your students started - ‘The Sand and the Scarab’ by Cian Gill

To use this with students you could create a story yourself or choose one of the stories featured on their blog and build comprehension tasks or just let students read and then compare their journeys through the story.

You can also get your students to write a story collaboratively and take it in turns to add the different options at the end of each paragraph.

Inklewriter is a great tool to get students writing and makes the process of creating this kind of branching interactive narrative much easier to manage.

Saturday, 9 September 2017

Newspaper Generator is a useful tool that enables you to create what looks like a newspaper front page.

To do this you upload an image, select a title and a headline and then write in the details of the story. Then just click on 'Make it' and the site will produce a PDF that you can download.

You can use this in class for a number of activities.

This is a nice way to get students writing news type texts and then publishing them.

You can also use it to get them thinking about fake news by creating a selection of news articles, some based on real news stories and others that you invent. You can then ask them to research the articles and find out which ones are real and which are invented.

You could also use the headlines and articles to generate discussion over which are real and which are fake or work on how to spot fake news.

You could get students to create their own fake news test by creating two real news stories and one fake one. They can then see if they can trick their classmates into believing the fake one is true. They could use this Factitious game as their inspiration.

Friday, 8 September 2017

This is a fantastic idea for creating intercultural exchange projects with students from different schools around the world.

The site has a really wide variety of really interesting projects that you can choose from and they are really well designed and structured with learning goals, levels and age appropriacy clearly sign posted.

In order to register on the site as a teacher you have to be located at a physical school which you identify when you sign up.

Once this is done you can select your project and get your students registered using a class code that you find on your dashboard.

The site automatically matches your class up to another class somewhere around the world. Class match ups are done every Monday.Then your students will need to commit 30 - 45 mins each week for the length of the project (usually about 6 weeks)

All the materials are provided and the students just need a device (the service works on most devices) and an internet connection.You can find out more about the details here: https://www.penpalschools.com/faq.html

PenPal Schools is free for the first 5 teachers at any school, after that the school has to buy a licence.

This looks like a really cleverly designed way to get your students engaging with other schools around the world.

Wednesday, 6 September 2017

The app is based around a common classroom activity in which students write stories together by adding a sentence and passing it on to another writer. The next writer then adds a sentence and either passes it back or passes it to another student. The process continues until the story is finished.

In this app version users create an account and then write the introduction to the story. You can add links to images in the introduction phase too, so this can help inspire other writers. Once the introduction is create you can either make it public, share it through social media
or share it with selective people.

The app works both synchronously and asynchronously and has a text chat window on the side of the interface so students can interact with each other as they build the story.The app works in the browser so it will run on a laptop or mobile device. This makes it particularly suitable for the BYOD classroom.

TaleShip is a great way to get students writing collaboratively and you can follow it up with some peer correction or get the students to take the stories and enhance and improve them by adding more description and detail.